So You Wanna Run a Country?: A Novel

When will our reality show obsession bring us to watching game show contestants gain temporary political control over an entire nation? Kevin Holohan’s So You Wanna Run a Country? brings us to that future. We become virtual spectators, seeing how it might play out.

Residents of Newer York, Mooney and Wendy, are cast to be temporary political leaders of Inner Azhuur, a mysterious authoritarian nation isolated from the rest of the world before deciding to host the latest season of So You Wanna Run a Country? If you are looking for clever, cutting social science fiction similar to Orwell, this is not the book for you. Rather than being grounded in realism to make the reader relate, Holohan’s book exaggerates the absurd to such an extreme that the story suffers a lack of humanity.

Despite all the work Holohan does to build the world of this novel, he does not put in the same work to build human characters for the reader to care about. The result is a satire that is not subtle, a sociopolitical culture that exists only for the author to illustrate a didactic message, and ultimately a boring book that gives the reader no hope.